Karen Bottle Capps

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Born in Malvern, Arkansas, Karen spent most of her childhood years combing through treasures at the city dump. While smelling cleaning chemicals mixed with rotten eggs, she coddled baby chicks discarded by the local chicken hatchery. Pulling from this heaping trash pile, Karen created the first of many found object collages, using doll heads, broken Matchbox cars, bottle caps, and the occasional fork on a backdrop of mud in pursuit of assembling her masterpiece. From there, the art of dump diving became her passion, transforming one man’s trash into her own personal form of folk art.